Helping dyslexic children attend to letters within visual word forms.

L earning to read visual words aloud requires a novel integration of two distinct neurocognitive systems: a visual system that allows one to recognize a visual word from a crowd of letter features and a phonological language system that allows one to recognize and produce spoken words from a crowd of phonetic features (1). Integrating these two systems through the alphabetic principle bestows skilled readers with the ability to appreciate how each letter feature within a crowded visual word form specifically influences each corresponding nuance in its spoken form (e.g., trails vs. traits). Children with developmental dyslexia, a condition that affects as many as 10% of school children (2), face profound challenges in fluently integrating their visual and phonological systems in the service of reading (3). As a result, reading is slow and error prone, which can have severe cascading influences on a child’s life. Thus, a central focus in cognitive investigations of dyslexia has been to gain insight into how individual differences in the development of phonological and/or visual processing systems influence the reading acquisition process. Leveraging such insights to improve reading acquisition has remained a central exemplar for the potential of basic cognitive and developmental sciences to bestow translational benefits to education and society. Significant progress has been made by focusing on the phonological side of dyslexia, providing the central insight that the alphabetic principle on which our writing system is based requires children to attend to and recognize subsyllabic features within spoken words (phonological awareness) and that deficits in this form of selective attention directly contribute to difficulties in reading acquisition (4). Moreover, translational research directed at enhancing attention to the phonological features within spoken words shows improvements in reading skills for children with dyslexia. Such findings have been well-replicated, supporting significant effects within metaanalyses (5, 6), which in turn, have influenced national policy on evidence-based reading instruction. Although substantial research efforts have focused on visual system contributions to dyslexia, such studies have not yet approached this level of support or widely adopted translational success. Recent findings, however, suggest that this asymmetry may soon be changing. The study by Zorzi et al. (7) in PNAS provides a clear demonstration of an easily measured visual phenomenon that helps children with developmental dyslexia, adding to a growing body of research that shows it to be a well-replicated, theory-driven insight into how visual–spatial attention skills contribute to dyslexia. Importantly, this research also has clear translational implications that might be readily implemented on a large scale.